Skip to content

FW: For MSU senior, pandemic helped career plans come into focus

 


From: MSU News <[email protected]&gt;
Sent: Thursday, May 5, 2022 9:05:35 AM (UTC-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada)
To: [email protected] <[email protected]&gt;; [email protected] <[email protected]&gt;; [email protected] <[email protected]&gt;; [email protected] <[email protected]&gt;; [email protected] <[email protected]&gt;; [email protected] <[email protected]&gt;; [email protected] <[email protected]&gt;
Subject: For MSU senior, pandemic helped career plans come into focus

For MSU senior, pandemic helped career plans come into focus

Marshall Swearingen, MSU News Service

05/05/2022 Contact: Matthew Magoon, [email protected].

Summary: Matthew Magoon tended to COVID-19 patients in the ICU while conducting biomedical research at MSU and now will pursue a career in medical research and practice.

A high-resolution photo to accompany this story is available on the Web at:
http://www.montana.edu/news/pressroom/?id=22084

___________________________

BOZEMAN — Like many college seniors graduating this May, Matthew Magoon forged his path at Montana State University amid the coronavirus pandemic. As did countless others, he improvised and persevered with classes, research projects, jobs and extracurricular activities. But for Magoon, with the disruption also came a calling, and his career plans came into focus.

While engaged in multiple medical research projects at MSU, Magoon also worked in the intensive care unit and emergency room at Bozeman’s hospital, tending to COVID-19 patients. Drawing upon those experiences, after he walks across the stage during MSU’s commencement ceremony on May 13 he will enroll in University of Washington’s Medical Scientist Training Program, a combined M.D. and Ph.D. degree track that will allow him to continue both medical research and practice. Ultimately, he said, he wants to be able to improve treatment of traumatic injuries.

“I love helping people,” said Magoon, an Honors College student majoring in biological engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in MSU’s Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering. “Being able to care for someone by applying science and technology, by earning their trust and working with a team of people, it’s very rewarding.”

A native of Colorado Springs who was drawn to MSU for its mountain setting and opportunities for undergraduate research, Magoon started out majoring in biochemistry. He had trained as an EMT in the summer after high school and thought he might want to go to medical school. By the end of his freshman year, however, he was feeling the pull of engineering, drawn by how fluid mechanics and other technical principles could explain how the body works. He changed his major.

Around the same time, he went to MSU’s Freshman Research Symposium, where he heard Stephanie McCalla, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, describe her work. “I thought, ‘This is awesome,’” Magoon said. After inquiring about a position in McCalla’s lab, Magoon began working there, contributing to a project to study early detection of tumors.

“I wasn’t sure I would actually like doing research, but I wanted to have the experience,” Magoon said. “I ended up falling in love with it. It’s hard work, running experiments and having a lot of them fail. But it’s also kind of addictive, working with these little pieces of puzzles and trying to put them together.”

By spring of his sophomore year he was starting his own project in McCalla’s lab, to detect acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — in cases of suspected overdose, a leading cause of liver failure. Just as he was starting the work in the lab, the pandemic struck. Amid shelter in place orders, most research in the lab was suspended.

The disruption was disappointing, Magoon said, but also offered an opportunity for reflection. He had been working as a resident adviser in an MSU residence hall, but found himself mostly without residents. While he finished out his contract for the job through his junior year, during which he was able to resume his research project as well, he turned back to his interest in medicine, freshly fueled by the urgency of the new coronavirus. Last May he landed a job working in the cancer center at Bozeman Health. By August, he was working in the ICU as the Delta variant was surging in Montana.

“Being face-to-face with that, seeing patients I couldn’t save, it made it very real,” Magoon said. While caring for patients, he also found his mind pulled toward the underlying science of their treatment, with his engineering classes and research giving him a deeper understanding. He worked 12-hour shifts in the ICU on weekends, with some shifts in the ER as well, before transitioning in January fully to the ER, where he still works.

Meanwhile, Magoon resumed his work in McCalla’s lab on detecting acetaminophen overdose. “It was a very challenging project,” McCalla said, and navigating it during the pandemic was only one of the hurdles Magoon encountered. “He took everything in stride and pushed through it. He’s really hard-working and you can tell he really cares about what he’s doing.”

Magoon said he valued how accessible different experiences, including research experiences, are at MSU. “The connection with the faculty here has been fantastic,” he said. “Everyone is so helpful and so approachable.”

As he looks past graduation to the UW program, a unique and competitive degree track typically accepting only a dozen students per year, he can see how the late nights of studying for classes, the long shifts in the ICU and all the trials in the research lab center around a sense of purpose that comes from helping people when they need it most, he said.

“It all comes together when you’re standing next to someone who’s breathing because of what you did,” Magoon said. “Their loved ones are there, and you can tell them, ‘It’s going to be OK.’”

 

This story is available on the Web at: http://www.montana.edu/news/22084